Wireless Hacks

Pebble

Use this tiny Debian-based distribution for your own custom wireless access point.

Terry Schmidt of NYCwireless has done terrific work in getting together a stripped down Linux distribution specifically tailored for wireless access points in general, and for the Soekris [Hack #51] platform in particular. This distribution is called Pebble, and is freely available at http://www.nycwireless.net/pebble/. It aims to balance functionality with size, weighing in at about 47 MB. As it is based on Debian, customizing the installed software is very straightforward. Unlike some very tiny distributions, it uses standard libraries and binaries. This significantly simplifies upgrades, and it means that custom packages don’t have to be built from source and linked to custom, stripped-down libraries.

• Based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1 (Woody)

• Linux Kernel 2.4.20 with IPv6 modules

• HostAP 0.0.2 and utils

• bridge-tools

• djbdns caching dns server

• NoCatAuth running as nonroot user, post 0.81 nightly

• openSSH server 3.4p1

• openSSL 0.9.6c patched

• pcmcia-cs

• ppp and pppoe

• Zebra 0.92a-5

There are also a number of shell niceties, including wget, elvis, tcpdump, perl, and even lynx. It runs well on every Soekris model, and will spawn a serial console on those machines (or any machine that has a serial port available). It runs on virtually any 486 class machine (or better) with at least 32 MB RAM. If you don’t need all of the functionality provided in the standard distribution, you can easily strip out the components ...